Vampire Weekend in Los Angeles, Getting Older and “Only God Was Above Us”

The members of Vampire Weekend are superb at this.

Gathered final afternoon to speak in regards to the band’s fifth album, “Only God Was Above Us”, frontman Ezra Koenig, bassist Chris Baio and drummer Chris Tomson determined to play a little bit recreation through which they may attempt to identify the LP No. 5 from half a dozen high-profile artists.

Five out of six are proper: U2 (“The Joshua Tree”), Kanye West (“My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy”), Bruce Springsteen (“The River”), Bob Dylan (“Bringing It All Back Home”) and Coldplay ( “Mylo Xyloto”). But even with what they get fallacious – Koenig initially misidentifies Madonna’s fifth album as “Like a Prayer” earlier than correcting himself on “Erotica” – they stunning solidly show their mistake.

“So she turns into Madonna over the course of the primary three, then ‘Like a Prayer’ solidifies that,” Koenig says. “Maybe a little bit early. Doesn’t “Like a Prayer” have the power of the fifth album?”

It’s no shock that these unabashed music nerds have quashed this problem, as Vampire Weekend have peppered their indie rock, for practically 20 years, with references and allusions drawn from a cautious and enthusiastic examine of pop historical past.

On tour this yr, the band carried out a country-themed medley titled “Cocaine Cowboys” that connects Vampire Weekend’s “Married in a Gold Rush” with “Sin City” and the Flying Burrito Brothers’ “All the Gold in California.” by the Gatlin brothers; for an encore, the musicians take requests from the viewers and try and cowl songs they do not essentially know play, together with Steely Dan’s “Peg” and the B-52s’ “Rock Lobster,” each of which (largely) succeeded transfer on to the Hollywood Bowl in June.

But they’re additionally keenly conscious of the inventive arc inherent in a discography and the story it tells about an artist or band. As Koenig sees it, albums 1, 2, and three are about creating an id; Album 4 represents a possibility to stretch out and “spend a few of that capital.” The fifth LP, he says, needs to be “a assured distillation of what you do. Show that you realize who you’re and that you simply nonetheless have fuel within the tank.

Koenig, 40, remembers seeing the video for the Beastie Boys’ “Intergalactic,” the lead single from the rap trio’s 1998 “Hello Nasty” — “a traditional fifth album,” in his phrases. “They had by no means completed something like this, however at that time you knew them properly sufficient to assume it was good. It’s like: totally different, however clearly.

That’s an apt description of “Only God Was Above Us”, mixing types and textures with the band’s typical complexity – try the best way “Ice Cream Piano” strikes between stately ballads and galloping rock – savoring a loud new edge .

“On each album, they make the complexity irresistible,” says Thomas Mars of French band Phoenix, who selected Koenig to look on the tune “Tonight,” from 2022’s “Alpha Zulu” LP. “Their music is so layered and attracts on from so many instructions. Yet they at all times sound like them, which is what a real artist does.

Thomas Mars, middle, and Laurent Brancowitz, left, of the French band Phoenix carry out with Ezra Koenig throughout the closing ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

(Oli Scarff/AFP by way of Getty Images)

Phoenix has invited Koenig to play “Tonight” on stage a number of occasions over the previous two years, together with throughout the closing ceremony of final summer season’s Olympic Games in Paris and at May’s Just Like Heaven competition in Pasadena, the place Koenig remained after “Tonight” “. to affix Phoenix for his hit “1901.” “He was simply riffing on his guitar, surrounded by six different musicians, and made the tune sound like Vampire Weekend,” Mars recollects with fun.

Titled after a New York Daily News headline proven on the album cowl, “Only God Was Above Us” — which might earn Vampire Weekend its fourth Alternative Music Album nomination on the Grammy Awards — brings collectively ideas on among the figures cultural and political maneuvering that formed the band’s former hometown. Vampire Weekend fashioned in 2006 whereas the members have been college students at Columbia University in New York, though Koenig, Baio and Tomson all now dwell in Los Angeles. (Koenig’s associate, with whom he shares a 6-year-old son, is actor Rashida Jones, who – enjoyable truth – was directed by Mars’ spouse, Sofia Coppola, in 2020’s “On the Rocks.”)

As a New Yorker transplanted to Los Angeles, Koenig attracts a line between his lyrical issues and the truth that the New York-obsessed film “Seinfeld” was filmed right here and that the Beastie Boys “lived in Los Angeles once they made ‘Paul’s Boutique,’ which has a lot New York taste.” Koenig handed the real-life facade of Jerry Seinfeld’s fictional condominium constructing in Koreatown. “It’s a classic constructing, not like a West Hollywood condominium constructing,” he says, reclining along with his companions of bands on a sofa of their supervisor’s workplace. “But the extra you have a look at it, the extra you say, ‘Yeah, I see it.'”

The members attribute the brand new album’s comparatively uncooked sound to the numerous hours spent enjoying collectively in a rehearsal room Baio and Tomson preserve in Eagle Rock. Yet Ariel Rechtshaid, who has co-produced Vampire Weekend’s final three albums — and who has additionally labored with Haim, Usher and Charli XCX — notes that in some methods the recording course of was extra elaborate than the band’s earlier, extra orderly information .

“It provides the phantasm of being much less produced,” Rechtshaid says. “But this was a ton of human efficiency”: individuals plucking guitars, individuals enjoying saxophones, individuals sawing cellos and violins. Indeed, Koenig’s singing has by no means been extra expressive – wistful on “Mary Boone,” tender however suspicious on “Prep-School Gangsters” – which Rechtshaid says is at all times the aim within the studio. “Nothing is extra necessary than the voice talking to you thru the audio system,” he says. “Everything else is simply there to serve that.”

When Vampire Weekend started, one side of the band’s plan was to recontextualize sure types that had maybe fallen out of trend: the ska components, for instance, which determine prominently on the group’s self-titled 2008 debut, launched within the wake of the revival of New York garage-rock. “There was a deliberate provocation in regards to the style,” Koenig says now. “I think about somebody the place, in the event that they assume one thing is gorgeous, I have to assume it isn’t stunning. And in the event that they thought one thing wasn’t stunning, I needed to assume it was stunning.

Vampire Weekend’s “Only God Was Above Us” might earn the band its fourth different music album nomination on the Grammys.

((Jennifer McCord/For The Times)

“But the sport of generational style can solely be performed for a sure interval,” he provides. (It’s most likely value noting that Vampire Weekend remade a lot of its previous hits in ska mode on the Hollywood Bowl.) “As you become older, I feel it comes all the way down to issues which can be a little bit extra everlasting: Do your songs join? And songs that persist with individuals for years or many years are uncommon.”

Vampire Weekend will spend the remainder of 2024 on the street in its semi-jammy seven-piece dwell incarnation, which incorporates a second drummer along with Tomson, who in the present day wears a Herbie Hancock T-shirt to commemorate the jazz legend’s latest reunion with the his boss. Band of hunters on the Bowl. “We’re nonetheless and not using a gong, although,” Tomson factors out. “Two drummers and 0 gongs is a pleasant, sturdy boundary, I feel.”

Musicians are additionally reflecting on Vampire Weekend’s story arc Next 5 albums might chart. “I like seeing an getting old singer-songwriter attain that second the place he simply would not surrender,” Koenig says. Told {that a} DGAF period appears troublesome to think about for a band that pays as a lot consideration to element as this one, Koenig responds: “You’re completely proper, however that is the problem. I noticed a T-shirt that claims, ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff,’ after which beneath it says, ‘It’s all of the little issues.’” He smiles on the considered the banal aphorism.

“I’ve to perform a little research to seek out out if that is true.”